Market Changes

Energy Star homes in Phoenix save energy, but there is still room for improvement.

Eleven years after EPA launched its Energy Star Homes program, the marketplace for new homes has changed—but by how much? That’s the question we set out to answer by assessing more than 7,000 homes in the Phoenix Home Energy Efficiency Study. In 2004, Advanced Energy partnered with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Arizona Public Service (APS), Southwest Gas, and several national home builders to assess thousands of homes in the Phoenix area and to compare actual energy use data for homes built to various efficiency standards.Through assessing the results,we wanted to determine how much energy the baseline and Energy Star homes actually consumed; if homes built to Energy Star standards were more efficient than baseline homes; and if the implementation of Energy Star and other efficiency programs in new home construction resulted in a reduction of total energy consumption.